East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

Everything with Brandon Chillar is pretty simple. The 23-year-old St. Louis Rams linebacker exudes his Southern California upbringing and seems to take everything in stride — even being one of the first Indians in the NFL.  By Jayna Rust

With the glassy waves of the Pacific Ocean just five minutes away and an ocean view from his family’s back yard, Brandon Chillar grew up like most kids in the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad. “I used to go to the beach before school,” Chillar recalls. Even after he started making more of a commitment to sports, the beach remained a big part of his life. “In the summers, I’d just work out and go down to the beach.” 

Now a starting linebacker for the St. Louis Rams, Chillar’s been a bit land-locked for the majority of the past couple of years. And even though he says West Coasters may be a little more “relaxed,” due in part, he thinks, to the beach culture, he is also enjoying the Midwestern life. “Everyone that I’ve encountered has been really nice and especially supportive of their sports teams,” he says, “and it’s definitely a bigger sports town out there.”

But despite the loyal fans, the Rams have floundered the past two seasons. After a .500 year in 2004, the Rams had a 6-10 showing in 2005 — with much of the blame going to the Rams’ weak defense, ranked 30th in the 32-team NFL. Determined to change that, the Rams have begun 2006 with a new coaching staff, which has picked up the players’ energy. “Everybody feels like they have a shot to show the new coaches what they can do,” Chillar says. And although competition is heating up for defensive positions, Chillar is confident he’ll keep his starting position, and local media seems to agree.

He’s impressed his past and current coaches with a pretty straightforward philosophy: “Basically, I don’t worry about numbers,” he says. “I just worry about doing what I’m supposed to do every play… do it as good as I can so that the coaches know they can depend on me and I’m running their system.”

Following someone else’s system is something Chillar shouldn’t find too difficult; he says he grew up under a strict father. Ram Chillar, a motivated, athletic young man from a family of 16 kids, left New Delhi in the 1970s for the U.S. “He started out working at a car wash for his job,” Chillar says of his father, who’s owned a few local businesses and currently owns a 7-Eleven. “It’s like the full-on American tale. He had no money. First paycheck bought a pair of Levi’s, and stuff like that … That dude, he’s an inspiration in himself.

“He’s strict,” Chillar adds. “We used to butt heads when I was younger. But then I started understanding he’s just trying to mold me to be a good man. I look back now and realize that and appreciate it.” It’s comments like this that make Chillar seem closer to 55 than 25. But then watching him talk about his friends and family, it’s clear the comments are a combination of maturity — which he acknowledges he’s been working toward professionally — and that laid-back Southern California attitude. He can be a hand-talker, and anytime he gets excited, both hands often instinctively revert to the forefinger and pinky pointing out — the universal sign of skaters and rockers.

It’s the small things, like his rock-on sign, that are inescapable giveaways of where Chilllar grew up. “You’ve got so many guys surfing, guys going to the Winter X Games,” he says of his high school classmates. These other young athletes are participating in sports usually associated with upper-middle class Caucasians, which is what makes up a good portion of Carlsbad; according to census information, the city’s families earn about $20,000 more than the nation’s average and it is 87 percent white. It is a place where Chillar’s multicultural heritage left him open for childhood taunting.

“When we were younger and kids didn’t even know what they were doing, they would say stuff,” he says, once again sounding as though he’s lived more than his 23 years. “You know, whatever, ‘camel jockey’ all that kind of stuff you hear, but not too bad. It’s not like (my brother and I) were getting picked on out of the ordinary. We were pretty tough kids. We wouldn’t take too much.”

Both broad-shouldered boys were well over 200 pounds in high school; all the meats and pastas their mom, Kathy, fed them, (It wasn’t until adulthood that Chillar started liking curry and other Indian foods) had bulked the boys up, and their excellence at sports and friendly personalities helped them to fit in as they got older.

In fact, it wasn’t until two years ago that Chillar felt his ethnicity had become a big deal again. When he was the 130th draft pick in 2004, a reporter from an Indian newspaper told him he was the first person of Indian descent to play in the NFL. Turns out, Chillar isn’t the first, but he is indeed one of a select few Indian Americans to make it into the league (Sanjay Beach, 1988-1994, 49ers, Packers, Jets; Bobby Singh, 1999, Rams). Either way, the information was surprising to the green-eyed Chillar. With the high turnover rate of NFL players and many well-known Asian athletes in other sports, it had never occurred to him that he would be making history. “Obviously, anything I can do to give other people motivation and get their kids out there and to think that they can do it now, is cool with me,” he says with a bit of a shrug. “I’ll try to lead the way. I’ll just do what I can do, and if other people are inspired by it, then that’s a plus.”

But whether or not he leads a new generation of Indian players into the NFL, Chillar seems like he’ll be OK either way. His goals for now are to keep up his work on the field and to eventually own his own business — and of course some day to move back to Southern California, where he can finally take up surfing. “I’d probably try a short board first,” he says thinking about that day, “but I’m kind of a bigger dude, so depending on what happens, we’ll see once I get out there.”

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